


Dreamer

by SLWalker



Series: Taking Flight [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Physical Therapy, Recovery, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 17:27:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11879316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: Physical therapy, Obi-Wan's master and the mundane issues that come up when you have large, feathered limbs: Maul spends most of his time in some state of beleaguered, but it's not anywhere as bad as he'd been led to believe.





	Dreamer

A great deal went into having wings.

Beyond the mundane annoyances – the inability to sit comfortably on any furniture with a back rest, absent the occasional stool tall enough; the inability to stretch them in most indoor places, the occasional knocking of things over because there were no nerve endings in feathers to gauge easily where they were in relation to other things – there was the matter of upkeep.

There was grooming.  There was shedding feathers.  There was a deeply irritating  _itch_  where the new feathers were growing back in at the site of the now-healed blaster wound.

There was physical therapy.

Maul felt under siege most of the time.  In his mind, a quagmire of prior training conflicted with his present reality; instinct in conflict with necessity.  He was jumpy and reactive in ways that he had not been in years, on edge so much of the time that he was usually thoroughly exhausted by the time the day ended.  He had never in his life been handled by people as much as he was now; he wasn’t even sure  _how_  to feel about it, because everyone was incredibly– soft?  Gentle? with him, but it was still unfamiliar and unnerving, having hands on him.  Healers, mostly.  Master Jinn.  Obi-Wan Kenobi.

He remembered his Master telling him that Jedi either made other Force users join them, or they killed them.  But that wasn’t the case.  These Jedi didn’t try to make him one of them; they didn’t try to force him into their mold.  They also didn’t kill him; they went to some large effort, in fact, to  _heal_  him.  To fix the wing that his master had been preparing to cut off.  Maul was starting to grasp that there had been a twisted dichotomy in his master’s statements: If their flaw was compassion, yet they supposedly killed non-Jedi Force users–

Sometimes the mental conflict was so bad that all Maul could do was find the quietest place he had access to, curl up around himself, and shut everything out until he felt like he could breathe again.

Obi-Wan’s master was a far cry from Maul’s.  Reserved.  Patient.  He was the one that mostly took over the physical therapy aspect of helping stretch and strengthen that priorly wounded wing.  He was a very  _big_  man; tall and strong-featured, but not without grace.  He was also always willing to explain things if asked, though admittedly, it was hard for Maul to summon words sometimes to do so.

“You’re very twitchy today,” Jinn said, some note of amusement in his voice; as it often did, it took Maul a moment to overcome the conditioning that expected mocking and assess the tone for what it was. “You will tell me if you’re hurting,” he added; it wasn’t a question, it was a command, but not the kind Maul was used to getting.

It wasn’t pain – though sometimes this therapy business left him feeling sore – but that infernal itch.  Maul couldn’t reach it and he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to find a door frame to rub up against in the hopes of alleviating it, which left it as a constant irritant.

“Maul?” Jinn prompted, patiently, one hand still buried in feathers to support the elbow joint of Maul’s right wing.

After a moment of wrestling with himself about it, Maul half-mumbled, “It  _itches_.”

“Itches?”

Feeling– extraordinarily sheepish, Maul pointed across his own shoulder to the spot that was currently driving him mad, where those new feathers were just shedding their sheaths.

He was not even remotely prepared for the rush of relief when Jinn actually  _scratched_  it.  Gingerly, at first, then a bit more seriously, though he was clearly still being careful.  Maul had already learned from a prior doorway scratching attempt that brand new feathers could bleed a surprising amount for how small they were when broken.

It felt so good that his  _knees_  quivered.

“Better?” Jinn asked, even more amused.  But– kindly so.

Maul managed to nod and  _not_  sink to the floor in abject relief, as the itching sensation that had been constant for the past couple of days was disappearing.  The urge to go lean on the wall two-handedly was almost as overpowering as the urge to just sit down was.

Once it was finally gone, he gave a quiet  _thank you_ , and therapy went on like it always did.  Straightening, stretching, working through range-of-motion exercises.  Nothing like a kata, but it had some of the same meditative quality.

It still left him feeling exhausted, enough so that Master Jinn nudged him back to their quarters, and Maul was still floating in a haze of relief, having left behind a fair dusting of shed feather sheaths on the floor of the training room.

There was a spot on the living area floor where the sun would shine in during the mid-afternoon.  It had been Obi-Wan who had requisitioned pillows and blankets to make a bed there – Maul had given him quite a glare when the padawan had mischievously called it a  _nest_ – back when Maul had still been sleeping a good part of the day, just recovery from his injuries and also some deeper weariness of a life hard lived.  

Now, he flopped down on it without hesitation, wings just off his back enough for the black feathers to soak in the warmth of the sunlight.  He was so used to that itch now that he almost didn’t know what to do  _without it_.

“Rest well,” Jinn said, before moving off to do– whatever it was he was going to do when he wasn’t being back-scratcher and physical therapist for a winged zabrak.

Maul almost replied  _yes, Master_ , automatically, but nothing at all like he would have answered his own.  Thankfully – for his pride if nothing else – he managed not to.

When he fell asleep, though, in the light of the sun and with the calm, river-smooth presence of one Jedi and then later the blue-fire presence of the other, it was the first time he dreamed of flying.


End file.
